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Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$er
December 2018 #10233 Page #8
Celebrating 50 Years of Truss Design Part V: A Prequel to Hands-On Design
Joe Kannapell - Senior VP MiTek Industries, Inc. www.mii.com
W
hen Lou Lewis showed our engineers his $395 HP35 calculator in 1973, they barely blinked, but several in the truss industry did recognize its value. Perhaps we were too focused on our mainframe computer, and too invested in the programs that we had written. Others, however, saw its potential to expedite cutting lists. Little did they know that Hewlett Packard was then laying the foundation for the Silicon Valley, and its innovations would have an untold impact on the truss business, and the rest of the world.
The HP35’s biggest plus was its built-in trig functions, which were used repeatedly to calculate cutting lengths and angles. Previously, truss designers spent hours poring through the tables of Smoley’s handbook. At $395, the HP35 cost less than a designer’s weekly salary and quickly paid for itself.
A few insightful individuals dug deeper into the HP35’s key differentiating feature, its memory registers, and realized their use in storing and applying routine calculations. When its successor model, the HP65, was introduced in 1974, HP called it “a personal computer” and it indeed was fully programmable. What made the HP65 ideal for truss calculations was its magnetic card reader/writer shown here, which allowed an unlimited number of programs to be accessed to calculate cutting lists, for example.
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